The design and development process for many computer applications, including desktop applications, Web pages, and rich Internet applications, generally involves separate stages and often involves two or more sets of people with very different skill sets. Generally, there are designers who generate images of an application's appearance, for example, using a drawing program like Adobe® Photoshop®. Designers also often separately write specifications of how they want the application to behave, for example, when the user moves the mouse over a given part of the screen. Developers then take the images and specifications and develop a working application, generally by manually coding such an application. For example, in the context of web applications, a developer may first lay out a set of HTML tables or CSS stylesheets, then slice a designer's mockups into small pieces which are inserted into the tables or referenced by the CSS. The developer typically does this by “eyeballing” positions and then checking to see if the layout is the same. This is typically an error-prone process, in which the original appearance of the design can easily be incorrectly translated.
Similar problems are present in the design and development of rich Internet and desktop applications. Generally, the two-stage design-development process is subject to various disadvantages with respect to efficiency and accuracy of both the intended layout (where objects appear) and behavior (how objects act). Discrepancies often require additional iterations of the design-development process and, thus, additional effort by both designer and developer.
The use of declarative languages, platforms like the Adobe's® Flex® platform, and other technologies have helped reduce the gap in the design and development process. For example, declarative languages such as HTML and XML variants and related tools simplify assembling applications in many respects. However, inefficiencies and inaccurate artwork translation continue to hinder application development and there remains a substantial disconnect between artwork and application. While existing languages and tools provide flexibility in certain respects, they fail to adequately facilitate translation of a design image or other artwork to a collection of functional objects or other components that make a working application. In short, the path from a designer's broad graphical conception and functional intentions to a functioning application remains complicated and subject to inaccuracies and inefficiencies. The process of piecing apart and restructuring design artwork into a working application layout and a set of components remains both tedious and error-prone and is a commonly acknowledged pain point in the application design/development community.